Imperial War Museum

    I went to the Imperial War Museum yesterday with Kiley. The first three floors were about the war and different areas of it. On the third floor, they had paintings about the war or moments inspired by the war. I liked that because I really like art. I thought the first floor was pretty cool because they had planes hanging from the ceilings and vehicles in the styles of the time period of the wars they were representing.

     

      There was also a car completely destroyed being shown. It had been a civilian car from Baghdad, Iraq and had been destroyed by a suicide bomb in 2007. 

    On the third floor, we walked into a room with really cool art. On the wall there was an entire ship on the wall made from beads and glue. It was amazing and very creative. The artist, who's last name I can only remember, Locke, represented a a ship being led by a mythical ferryman who rowed the dead across the river to the underworld.

     In the same room there was also a ship inside a glass case suspended in the air, though up close you could see the strings holding it up. It was very cool and unique. Locke, who was the same artist for the beaded ship art, was representing a Second World War battleship in the form of a ghost ship that had been abandoned and weighed down with ice. It said on the summary of the artist that most of his sculptures usually hung like suspended animation, outside of time and space. I thought that was pretty cool and unique quality to his work that added a dash of imagination as well as fantasy, instead of just being a boring sculpture of a ship.

    On the fourth floor there was a Jewish Museum dedicated to the holocaust. We weren't allowed to take photos in there so I have none to post, but this was the part of the museum that impacted me the most. I went to the Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C. a few months before I came to London and had to fight back tears the entire time. This museum had a similar effect on me. It showed life before the Holocaust for Jewish people and then went on to how the hatred for them began. It showed the stages of Jews being taken to ghettos, than to concentration camps, and how the idea of exterminating them all was referred to as the "final solution." 

     Most of these things I knew because I'd learned them all in high school and through films such as Schindler's List. It didn't make it any less harder to read about and see though. They had photos, videos, passages to read, and the voices of real survivors telling their story or horrible moments that they remember. They also had some of the last letters written by these Jews. It's the videos of the survivors telling their stories that always touches me the most because seeing the emotion in their face as their reliving this moment by talking about it is just very real, and very emotional.

     It wasn't just Jewish people either, but african americans, gypsies, and homosexuals. Anyone disabled or with a mental problem was considered a life not worth saving because they were weak and so they were all killed by doctors. It's crazy to think how mind controlled these people were and that they actually believed the horrible things they were doing was right.

     Anyway, it left me feeling very lucky and blessed to be able to live the life that I do, and sad for those who did not have the same luck in life. My dad is Jewish and so is most of my family on his side, so I'm considered Jewish by heritage, though my mom raised me as a Christian. The Holocaust always effects me I think a little more deeply than it would someone who is not Jewish because I take it personally, and it makes me sad to think that my family and I would have been in a concentration camp if I'd been born in a different time. I'm really glad I went though because it always makes me feel proud to be Jewish and grateful for that life that I've been given.